Higher CTR = Higher eCPM = Higher EPC

Actually, it is a simple equation with only one equal sign:

eCPM = CTR * EPC

Like I said, it's simple math.

There is a direct correlation between CTR and eCPM. There is a direct correlation between EPC and eCPM.

I have never seen any correlation between CTR and EPC. In fact, my highest EPC page, by over an order of magnitude, has a relatively low CTR. My next highest EPC page has a relatively high CTR.

The most important question to me is the one Bill asked in the first comment, how does it affect your take home pay at the end of the month? Increasing your EPC, CTR or eCPM doesn't do you a damn bit of good if you are also reducing your number of impression by a larger margin.

If you've ever had a page on your site which is Digg'ed or Fark'ed, you'll see a high amount of low-performing traffic on that one page. The surprising thing is that your overall AdSense CPM will also decrease, making your revenue go down. To me this proves that low-performing ads on one page can affect CPM on all pages.

Let's think this thing through.

CPM, from an AdSense publisher's perspective, is the amount you earn from 1,000 impressions.

To make the math easy, let's say you're earning $10 for every 1,000 impressions.

You get a spike in low quality traffic. Low quality meaning fewer of those new visitors click and/or convert for the advertiser. Your earnings decrease to $5 for every 1,000 impressions.

That's not surprising to me that the CPM drops. It seems like a natural result.

And I don't see how the drop in CPM can be blamed on low-performing ads instead of the new low quality traffic. The ads were performing twice as good before the new surge in low quality traffic.

Unless I'm missing something.

FarmBoy

I have never seen any correlation between CTR and EPC.

I regularly see a direct correlation between a surge in targeted traffic and an increase in the CTR. Let's call that A.

I also regularly see a direct correlation between a surge in targeted traffic and an increase in EPC. Let's call that B.

And let's call the surge in targeted traffic C.

So C = A and C = B. So make whatever you want of the relationship between A and B.

FarmBoy

If the Digg traffic is of poor quality and they visit more than just that one page on your site, it will pull down other pages as well.

And I don't see how the drop in CPM can be blamed on low-performing ads instead of the new low quality traffic. The ads were performing twice as good before the new surge in low quality traffic.

Unless I'm missing something.

FarmBoy

What you're missing is that I said the result is lower overall (total) revenue, not lower CPM (although it is lower too.)

So again, in this case more traffic & more impressions = lower total revenue, which can only be explained by saying that one low performing page can effect revenue from all ads on the site.

And this is not an insignificant amount. On my site, one Digg'ed article typically lowers total adsense revenue by 20% or more, which amounts to hundreds of dollars of lost revenue.

Traffic from Digg can be converting poorly (CTR is irrelevant, conversions are relevant). And, yes, SmartPricing will make clicks on the entire site cheaper because of that, in a short time. Again, this has nothing to do with CTR.

BTW, this thread nicely illustrates why Google should allow publishers to see conversion rates for each of their AdSense channels. Only then could publishers start removing ads from poor-performing pages.

true_INFP, I agree, ASA can you check into this so we can know the conversion rates for each of our channels?

So C = A and C = B. So make whatever you want of the relationship between A and B.

There might be some common factor in "C" that equally improves both "A" and "B".

For example, a surge in traffic implies that the people are visiting at a higher rate than normal for some reason. That reason might attract ads that are worth more per click than ads displayed on an average visit. On the other hand, an advertising promotion might cause a surge of new visitors. Are new visitors' clicks worth more than clicks from a returning visitor? I don't know. That doesn't seem logical, although maybe they click 'better' ads.

What would YOUR criteria be for removing AdSense on poorly performing pages?

My #1 criteria is to remove ad blocks on pages which consistently display low paying ads.

I find huge discrepancies between average CPC; so much so that I have narrowed down my highest performing pages to about three urls, which within themselves need to be culled down to just one in bad times. On average I am talking about one to two urls with a small ad block which can make up to about $100 per day at times.

<sidenote>
The fact that I see such a large variation on the average CPC of certain adblocks/urls leads me to believe that this may be a product of Google automatically implementing it's evaluation criteria (smartpricing) and that smartpricing is conducted on a page by page basis. Well, that's the hypothosis, anyway.

So C = A and C = B. So make whatever you want of the relationship between A and B.

Except C!=A and C!=B. Just because there is a correlation, does not make them equal. Even if there is a correlation between one thing and two other things, does not mean those tow others are correlated when that one thing is removed.

...that just gave me a headache

After years of tweaking and analysis I am pretty sure Sally is on the right track. In particular, just one very simple, but illustrative example, when we added ad blocks, which resulted in dragging our CTR down about 60% (i.e. noone ever clicked on them), our total revenue at the end of the day/month literally dropped 40%! It took over 30 days to build back up to previous levels once we removed them. A year or two later we put them back at the advise of someone "well placed" and again the exact same thing happened. I could give you a number of other more complex examples from experience, but from what I have seen removing high traffic, low CTR/CPM pages, AND removing second and third blocks from the same page makes a world of difference to the positive side in the bottom lie.

Unfortuantely I also agree with what another poster says that more total page impressions, can bump you into another "VIP level." So the best strategy I've reached is to keep minimally producing pages with a single ad block per page.

Since I started with Adsense about 18 months ago I've been frustrated with one channel that has always performed poorly. Pull the ads? Never did and only recently has it been doing much better without any changes. It may be temporary but one thing is obvious; one new ad in particular is very targeted and well written.

coincidence? Only time will tell

On one of my websites, with massive traffic, I removed adsense from poorly performing pages and my revenue pretty much doubled.

I believe the badly performing ads pull your account down as a whole.

I also think Google does a similar thing with traffic. If there is a large % of asian traffic, you'd probably earn more by just blocking it all. Not that it would be fair to do that but I am sure if I did, my overall earnings would go up.

I have ads on each page (hundreds) (handcoded to their certain spots). It's unrealistic for me to change them up. That takes me away from making NEW PAGES with good content and placing the ads beautifully on there.

It would cost me MORE in time to track/assess/remove/replace those ads than I would see in return in ROI.

I guess if you have a php script running somehow to display ads and it's not time intensive then Yes.. test all you want.

In my case I would rather spend more time creating new pages and doing my TRACKING in the search engine side of things since as stated you can't test what you can't fully see. And I would not want to tie up my time changing things blindly NOT knowing if the outcome was because of me or google..

Yeah I have AREAS of my site that get large amounts of traffic per day... with only a few clicks.. but if I have RUNOFF traffic to other areas it seems those areas are doing fine. And MOST importantly the NEW AREAS I am working on are doing SPLENDID!

Build, Build, Build is my motto. ONE PAGE per day with good relevant content. Build your page RIGHT from the ground up and it pays off, atleast it does for me. Every page adds money in my case. Which deep down may not be that far from anyone else's case too if they step back from all the ANALYZING..

Just my opinion and experience... ;)

I have removed one of the 3 ads that run on all of my pages on 2 different sites. The result for the first few days was a dramatic increase in revenue. After about a week, this changed. My numbers went lower than they were before the change. When I added the third ad back, my revenue slowly climbed back.

Based on this experience, this is how I believe it works:

Google scans your pages periodically and knows how many ads you have running per page. If it scans and detects 3 ads, it then prepares what it thinks are the best ads to run for 3 spots for the next few days.

When you remove one of the 3 spots, now it has 2 spots to run the best ads. The better ads are displayed more often in the 2 spots instead of them being spread across 3 spots. Hence you get better performance. This continues until Google crawls your site again and realizes you only have 2 spots now. Now it 'rethinks' the ads and levels them out a bit.

I don't think this is something Google intended, but I think it's just how the system works.